Multiprompt2 f/UponTheAngelsWings

Multiprompt
for {UponTheAngelsWings}


Prompt One: Trust (Takeda Ryou, Armor of Wildfire; 238 words) [Ronin Warriors]

The trouble with being part of a cohort is everything that doesn't get said or spoken of at all, the things that are never shared amongst the group, and Ryou is horribly, terribly grateful for it regardless.

Not trusting the others is a problem, of course. Cye says it all the time, and Ryou even agrees with it; they can't have a proper alliance if they don't trust one another to stand by the agreements. Which is, on it's own, a whole different issue because there is no proper alliance or agreements or any of that nonsense, just the five of them and two civilians and Ryou's cat against an enemy so much bigger than they are.

But even if they had an alliance, Ryou would be hesitant to trust them. They're good people and they're determined that they are all going to come out of this alive, and it breaks Ryou to tell them that's not true, it's not possible. And he definitely doesn't want to start believing that it might actually be possible.

He's not sure any of them actually do, which is almost worse, but at the very least nobody talks about it, though sometimes... he thinks they want to.

The war is a bunch of nonsense when Ryou can trust his enemies not to give him the leniency that his cohort desperately apparently wants to.

He made his peace with dying a long time ago.



Prompt Two: Enemies (Mouri Cye, Armor of Torrent; 72 words) [Ronin Warriors]

The four Warlords are their enemies. Cye can feel that, nestled in his heart. There is something sick and sad about them, something Torrent wants desperately to cleanse, and it bothers him that he isn't sure what it is or how to wash it away.

They are enemies by chance, only. That, he can feel clear as moonlight on water.

But he isn't certain what they would be if things were different.



Prompt Three: Respect (Yamano Yulie; 119 words) [Ronin Warriors]

Yulie grew up worshiping the guys. In adulthood, he was aware of what it had been. Hero-worship, tempered with the bitter awareness that they were mortal in the end. That they bled as red as any man. He had grown up, longing, desperately, to be as they were; a hero himself, a swordsman, a warrior.

In adulthood, hero-worship had been chipped away by years of maturing. Growing up broke off the thin shell around the edges, tempering desperation to be a hero himself, snapping off the sharper edges until something more suitable, more proper took it's place. Until he aged into something worthy of being a hero, himself.

In adulthood, respect for his childhood heroes bloomed, and worship withered.  



Prompt Four: Forgiveness (Dais, Armor of Illusion; 161 words) [Ronin Warriors]

What Dais wont do is forgive him.

Anubis was a terribly selfish man, to go off on his own, to leave Dais himself behind. Dais is well aware of this, and presumably Anubis was well aware of this, too. But Dais had been following the head General since the day the scruffy young Samurai from the East had ended up dropped in the Warlords' proverbial lap, and so he had always known the Scorpion had a selfish streak ten miles wide.

More or less.

Sometimes selfish got tangled up in masochistic and sadistic, but truly they usually end up separate entities.

But the fact of the matter is that Dais had always known Anubis would be selfish. He knew the reason why Anubis had left him alone, the reason why Anubis had never asked him to come with him.

For Dais, Anubis has never done anything he needs to be forgiven for.

And Anubis never wanted Dais to suffer that way.



Prompt Five: Family (Quatre; 206 words) [Gundam Wing] {Clonebaby}

Creating a family tree for school is something of an exercise in bluffing. Quatre prides himself on it. It comes as easily as breathing, usually, and he doesn't even have to lie. Usually.

But the family tree is an exercise in bluffing, because Quatre doesn't really have answers for that. Because there are not any.

Mother has never told them who their father is. Not that they've ever really asked, of course, or really wanted to know until now. Though he still doesn't want to know. Their father isn't here, and either Mother has a good reason for that, or the man's dead, or he threw them away, or something.

Or there's more than one. Which is possible.

But none of that matters. Because when Quatre gets up there in front of the class and shows off his family tree, it only goes back one section; to Mother, and no further.

Then he watches the class, and silently dares any of them to make something of it that it isn't, to say something about the missing people. The assignment was to go back as far as they could, and he did; he went back as far as he cared to go.

Nobody said anything on it.



Prompt Six: Siblings (Treize; 981 words) [Gundam Wing] {Clonebaby}

Treize and Zechs don't have so much time between themselves, and there is even less between their siblings, but Treize is still the oldest, and he knows it's his responsibility to look out for all his siblings, even when they're being pests.

Duo is five when he gets really sick, Treize is barely seven. Mother makes sure they are healthy, and sometimes, but rarely, a cold brings them down, or they catch a fever. Treize remembers when he was five, and he spent Christmas day bundled under blankets and barely lucid. But when Duo starts coughing it's not the sound of a cold, not really. It's a wet, racking sound, deep and shuddering, and Duo looks positively miserable.

You cough with a cold. Especially if it's in your lungs. But Duo's cheeks are flushed like a high fever, and those two don't go together.

Speckles of red stain his brother's fingers.

Mother is in one of the lower levels of the base they call home. There is a specially marked pathway, a very specific hall, that they are allowed to go down when they need her from way back there. Treize checks Duo's palm and feels his forehead with his cheek, and then he calls for Zechs to go fetch Mother; tell her to come quick, to Duo's room.

He flees.

The rest of his siblings loiter, but Treize can't. He doesn't know what's wrong, but he knows it's something. It's important.

Duo is tiny and slight, even more so than Quatre several months younger, but he's not small enough for Treize to carry him. He tries anyway, curls one arm around Duo and uses his free hand to drag one of Duo's over his shoulder, bending to make it easier for him. Duo's short. Treize doesn't care.

They stop often on the way to the bedrooms; Duo tires quickly, and he coughs a lot. But they make it.

Treize kicks at the door for the lower latch and it slides open. He's never been inside Duo's room before, which is odd because they all spend time everywhere. A pair of bunkbeds have been converted into a tent with a sliding cloth around the edges, and everything is done in black and red and blue, with stars painted on the ceiling and a bright, sickly-green carpet. The baby bed he had used when he was younger had been converted to a desk, and books and little action figures litter the room.

There's a huge poster of the Gundam Deathscythe on the wall.

Treize doesn't care about any of it. He draws the curtain open with one hand and sits Duo on the bedspread of bats and crosses, and then he lets him go to head to the attached bathroom.

He comes back with a cool cloth and uses it to clean the blood from the corners of Duo's mouth, from his palm and fingertips, and then he checks his forehead again.

His little brother lays down after that, fully dressed, and Treize huffs and starts undoing his shoelaces. Mother comes in when he's pulling off the second shoe and checks Duo's temperature herself, and then his pulse, and then she excuses herself. She comes back a few moments later with the huge red and white bag she hauls out whenever they get sick. Checks his eyes with a flashlight, with Duo grumbling the whole time, and then has him breathe into a machine, and then she checks his heartbeat with a stethoscope, and then she rolls up his sleeve and uses a square smelling like alcohol to clean a patch of skin.

Duo flinches away weakly when she opens the needle from it's packaging, but when she holds out her hand for his arm he gives it to her without protest. Treize lingers worriedly by the bedpost as she draws blood, and Zechs lingers at the door, and by now everyone else has come to see what's going on.

When Mother's done she has Treize get a pair of Duo's pajamas from the closet and starts stripping him out of his play clothes, and then she redresses him and tucks him into bed, and goes to get a clean, wet washcloth and a bucket. The bucket gets tucked next to the bed, and she shifts Duo to lay near the edge, and then the rag gets folded up and placed on his forehead.

Then she shoos them all out, except Treize because he's the eldest, and she asks him to watch his brother, and she's gone again.

She comes back regularly to check on them both, looking worried, her expression pinched. Her third trip she brings in an IV stand with a heartbeat monitor and hooks it all up to Duo's arm and chest. Treize knows somethings wrong; he always does, when she looks like that. When he asks, she only says he's sick.

But she brings them both dinner in Duo's room, and she comes in with another needle too, a syringe of something pale and off-colored. She talks Duo into waking up to eat a little, and then adds the needle of something into his IV line, and pets his hair.

After dinner all the kids pile up in Duo's room, and she reads them a story while they unfurl sleeping bags on their brother's floor, even little Wufei, the youngest at barely four. She doesn't leave until she's sure they're all asleep, but Treize isn't. He isn't. He can't sleep. He's worried.

“Will Duo be okay, Mother?”

Mother checked the machines, first and brief, and then she leans down to check Duo's forehead again.

“...yes. He will be now. In a few more days.”

The next morning Mother is giving them all shots. Treize remembers Duo the day before, pale and coughing blood in his bed, hot with fever, and he's the first to offer Mother his arm.



Prompt Seven: Goodbye (Heero; 831 words) [Gundam Wing] {Clonebaby}

Seven teenagers in the same house was invariably going to be an issue. Heero had known that, or a part of him had. Mother tried, but she made an eighth personality to clash with, and she was an authority, and he had read the books. Teenage rebellion, it had called it.

Seven teenagers. Mom had gotten them there, but it was up to themselves to make it any further.

They had always had their spats. Mom had always broken them up. But...

Heero pressed his lips together and kept walking. This fight had been different. Life had been different, ever since Christmas last year. He was amazed it had taken this long to come to a head. Six months... But it hadn't really sunk in until they had seen it as certainty during Queen Relena's parade hours ago.

It had hurt, to know viscerally he'd known her. To remember it not with memories, but with every fiber of his being instead.

But Zechs had taken it worse. Captain Marquise had marched before the Lady, and after her had fallen into place a duet of young cadets and three more proper members of the Sanq Guard to bring up the rear.

One of  those cadets had been Captain Marquise's mirror image.

The other had been Zechs'.

So Heero hadn't been surprised when Zechs had turned on Mom and asked what was going on, and Mom gave up trying to herd them indoors as a lost cause. She offered to take the conversation elsewhere, to have it over lunch, and Zechs had refused. In the end, Mom had relented and told him they had been his predecessor's family. Captain Marquise had been his wife, and the two children were their offspring.

Zechs hadn't said anything, after. He had just walked off, and Mom had stood there, quiet, with the rest of them in an unsure gaggle around her, until Wufei had curled his fingers around Mom's shoulder reassuringly, and steered her in the direction they had parked the van.

Heero probably should have followed them. Treize had looked between Wufei and Mom, and where Zechs had gone, and then had quietly excused himself to follow after the platinum blond. Duo had fallen into step on Mom's other side, and Quatre and Trowa had divided up the shopping list and vanquished.

Heero had turned away and followed after the parade.

Which had brought him to now. He stopped at the crosswalk, the light red, and watched the building across the street.

Queen Relena's hotel, the Centennial Rose. She was staying here in preparation for a week long conference. Advocating peace, probably. It sounded like something a Peacecraft would do. He didn't know what the conference was about. It didn't matter. What mattered was her Captain of the Guard had shattered something in his brother, and Heero wanted some sort of consolation.

The light turned green. He made his way across the street and into the Centennial Rose's lobby, silent and virtually invisible. Everyone was focusing on their great and important guests. Queen Relena probably wasn't the only one. Nobody paid him any mind.

They would have put her in a suite at the top of the hotel, he decided, and stepped around a bellhop. Around a corner. Past the restrooms. He pressed his way through the door to the stairs and started to climb. They wouldn't go all the way; there would be a VIP elevator to the top, certainly, but he could go up three flights and get out, then make his way to the first elevator he saw and head to the twelfth floor. After that, all he would have to do would be to find an open room and head out onto a balcony. It would be easy.

He didn't have to go that far.

Queen Relena was making her way down the stairs, giggling to herself, out of breath. Heero stopped and stared at her, and then she looked up and stopped, too, and stared back.

She had twenty years on him, at least; maybe a bit more, but not likely any less. She was pretty enough, he guessed. Goldenrod blonde hair, blue eyes. Her parade dress was gone and she wore an open, military-like coat, white where her guards had borne varying colors. White white white, like the city wasn't going to turn them black with soot and smog in a measure of minutes.

A delicate hand pressed against the Lady's lips. She looked like she had seen a ghost. Heero guessed she had, in a way. Mom didn't tell them a lot of war stories, but it was a matter of public history that the Queen of the Sanq Kingdom had had a ghost.

“Heero...”

He vaulted over the railing. Hit the ground in a crouch and a roll, stood up and shook off the dust.

“Heero, wait!”

He didn't. He shoved his way back out of the stairwell and fled the hotel through a rear door instead.



Prompt Eight: Time (Wufei; 412 words) [Gundam Wing] {Clonebaby}

They spend most of their early years home-schooled, and it's easy because they don't know anything else is out there. It's not that Mother doesn't take them outside, of course; they follow her like a gaggle of ducklings to the store, to the park, where-ever. Treize in the lead and Zechs taking up the rear, the two eldest, and then it's Heero, and Duo, and Quatre and Trowa, and him in the middle.

Mother doesn't put them in that string. It's just natural.

But they don't do public school in the beginning. They have their books, and Mother, and the extranet with secure access terminals to things public ones can't find. She encourages them to spend time in the library, and she teaches them in the training rooms as much as she can, and when she fumbles with what they really want to learn, well, that's what training videos are for.

Time goes on though. Wufei is thirteen when he and his brothers finally join their elder siblings in public school. Treize has breezed through the school already, become class president; Zechs has successfully managed to acquire a whole gaggle of girls that stalk him on campus, and mostly off it. Heero is ambivalent, Trowa is mute, Duo and Quatre are ecstatic, though the former more obviously than the second.

Wufei literally has no idea what he is. Honestly, he really doesn't want to attend. Attending means Mother spends hours alone in a quiet house, and he doesn't want that, she doesn't deserve it. Never the less, she'd asked him to try it for a year, and he said he would, so he will. It probably wont change his mind.

Trowa ends up in the school play. Quatre joins band. Duo ends up on the basketball team, which surprises no one.

Wufei finds Heero shoved in his locker on the first day, but he finds a half-dozen other kids three grades up in theirs every day after. He has no idea what his brother does with his after-school hours before their mother comes to pick them up, but Wufei spends it in the courtyard, with a book. Relaxing.

Every day after classes Mother asks them how their days were. What they learned. If they made any friends. There is always varying accounts.

At the end of the year Wufei decides to go ahead and continue school. But he only leaves the house when he has to. Mother shouldn't be alone so often.



Prompt Nine: Secrets (Hades, God of Death; 138 words) [Saint Seiya]

The five of them are the most precious thing Hades has to his name, and he can't even give them that. Persephone is a dangerous, jealous woman, and she wont stand for them.

But his children-- and they are his children, and he wanted and loves them all-- are something he must protect to the best of his abilities. Persephone can't have them. He loves her. He will never stop.

But she's not the only person he has ever loved, and she is not the first nor is she the last.

He can keep them all secret until Athena pokes at his prison again. Four out of five will never catch her eye; Lethe is Eridanos. There is nothing Hades can do to change that.

At the very least, when she dies, she'll be wholly his once again.



Prompt Ten: Hatred (Shun, Bronze Andromeda Saint of Athena; 1203 words) [Saint Seiya]

Try as he might, Shun couldn't hate him. He... couldn't. He didn't have it in him.

He felt guilty and sad instead, especially at night, when the world went quiet and he could feel the quiet, gentle double-pulse of two people in one form. In softer tatters their cosmos wove into one creation, not gently separated, and the other had raged and screamed and cried, and they had both woke with nightmares of Nike through their stomach.

Shun hadn't withdrawn when he had realized what had happened. Certainly, those first few days after the battle, he had felt all out of sorts. He'd had those nightmares then, too. Among others. But there had been too much to do-- so much to do.

The blade of Death had gone through Seiya. They had all trespassed into the realm of Gods and great heroes. They had opened the tomb that had held Hades' body safe and trapped since the days of old.

Things had gone awful. So many people dead, and the Lord of the Afterlife dead as well...

So he hadn't noticed. He had expected to be out of sorts, because everyone was. And if anyone else had noticed-- well. They had expected him to be.

And he had gotten so used to not seeing color that he hadn't realized that it hadn't come back. Hadn't realized he was picking out shades of white and black and gray, his mind supplementing what clothes were supposed to be what color. Hadn't realized he was just automatically classifying what the others wore by what they had always worn, instead of what they were wearing.

He hadn't realized he had wept for Pandora before Ikki ever told him she was dead.

So he hadn't noticed, and neither had they. Until Shiryuu-- Shiryuu, of course --had pulled him aside and asked what was wrong with his cosmos.

He-- they-- had told him it was nothing. Because it wasn't. He had grown up like this, edges of pink shading into darker tones, Andromeda's wind and the endless depth of a God's well, so deep light would never pierce it.

Shun knew, without a single drop of doubt, what it was after a fortnight. When he had reached inside himself for calm, and found hurt so deep he couldn't breathe.

After Hades' hold on him, his hair had bled red. Shun didn't remember it, himself, but he remembered someone mentioning it. When Tatsumi wanted to know why he had dyed his hair, they had brushed it aside with a laugh; it was dye, and it looked better, didn't it?

Even though they hadn't. Hades had apologized for that, in the quiet silence of the night, his voice a whisper from Shun's own tongue. They had broken things down after that-- and broken a vase.

He listened to his heartbeat, and His heartbeat, and the quiet.

Hades was a God. And killing a God was a sin no soul could commit, even under another God's name. It wasn't possible, that was all. Oh, Athena had killed his body. Athena could trap his soul, but the body was finally, finally free. It would reincarnate again, as Poseidon's always had, as Athena's always would.

But that would take time, and Hades wasn't prepared for that. He hadn't been settled in his own form when Athena had struck, his soul not tethered. So it hadn't gone with his body-- not yet. It had, instead, the whole of him but the flesh, had returned to what had been his host for thirteen years.

Shun. Shun, and his honesty, his passivity, his innocence, his forgiveness. Shun, and his young soul, everything that had made him Hades' perfect vessel.

Everything that made him Hades.

He'd gotten... stuck. He had stayed tied to Shun even after Athena's blood had touched them-- he had been in Shun so long that only Shun's death would sever them, now. Athena's blood had made sure of that. Shun could have gotten into Elysium without Athena's help. He'd been carrying part of Hades, after all.

Shun wasn't angry. Hades was angry enough; at Athena, but that was it. Athena pry-baring them apart had made things worse, not better. But then, Shun suspected, having heard the story, that Hades would always be angry at Athena. At his jailer.

Elysium had been his prison. Pandora's box had been his prison.

Now Shun was his prison. Athena's blood had made it so. They had been woven together before that, but capable of separation. She had forced them apart, and the threads that held them together had pulled taut.

Shun stared at the darkness of his room and tried to imagine himself in Hades' proverbial shoes, leashed to an agent of his jailer for the rest of the jail's natural existence. It made him sad. “..I wont do that to you.”

“I could cut us free,” Hades said after a moment, Shun's lips twisting into the words and his vocal cords aching, just a bit. They had been so sore, those first few days. He hadn't spoken a lot after taking over, in the safety of his world. In the Afterlife. It had hurt.

And now it still would, for a while. The muscles had to get used to pulling that way, to making the sounds for his voice. It might be easier when Shun got older and his voice cracked, but for now, they would make due.

Close as they were, thinking probably would have done the job. But it would have been less satisfying, and with the temptation of freedom so close, Hades would not pass up the chances to test his limits now. Shun was willing to let him.

Shun was staying quiet, aware of the rest Hades wasn't telling him. If not the details. Hades waited another moment more, and they reached out, together, and curled their fingers tentatively around a metal cup. Hades was, by nature, much, much stronger than Shun was. His cosmos augmented his every movement. They had broken a dozen glasses in the first few weeks already, enough that Kiki had found him metal ones. Metal bent, and could be reforged if it did.

Kiki, Shun thought, might know there was more than one person here.

He waited. Finally, Hades sighed, a sound deep and from the depths of shared, bruised lungs. It hurt, too. “Cutting us apart, as tight as she has made us, would be counterproductive. You... in Elysium... I'd like to see you there again. I do not want to damage those chances.”

“So it's not a option?”

“Not an option.”

That was okay, Shun decided. He had grown up this way; not having Hades' heart beside his own would leave him... lonely. He curled his arms around himself, nursing the sense of comfort of Them, which he knew Hades had probably always felt, but had never been able to really accept. Hades had been alone for a long time, and none of his hosts had ever been... willing.

“You can stay? We can just share.”

By the burst of surprise that was not his own, Hades clearly hadn't thought that an option, either.

That was okay. The one thing Shun couldn't do was hate him.